14 DAY TRIAL // The United States International Trade Commission in Washington is asked to block the import of the Nintendo Wii game console and of the various Wii controllers by a company called Hillcrest Labs, which also seeks cash compensation for patent infringement from Nintendo. It seems like a ploy to get Nintendo to pay up the damages as it faces the possibility of not being able to sell the Wii in the United States.
Hillcrest Labs issued a public statement regarding the lawsuit and says that "While Hillcrest Labs has a great deal of respect for Nintendo and the Wii, Hillcrest Labs believes that Nintendo is in clear violation of its patents and has taken this action to protect its intellectual property rights".
Hillcrest seems to be holding three patents for something called Freespace, a motion tracking technology that it has already licensed to companies like Logitech and Universal Electronics.
Yasuhiro Minagawa, who is the spokesman for Nintendo told Bloomberg over the telephone in Tokyo that "We haven't received any notice of the lawsuit and therefore are not in a position to comment at this time". Even if the lawsuit seems trivial, the company's shares have gone down in trading on the Japanese stock exchange by more than 1%. Since Nintendo has hit it big with its motion tracking and with the Nintendo Wii, a lot of small companies have sought to get a share of its success by suing it on patent infringement.
At the moment, Nintendo is facing a ban on the sales of the Wii Classic Controller, as a result of a lawsuit which was lost to Anascape Ltd. of Tyler, Texas. The ban is still not in effect, as Nintendo has appealed on the decision. There are other suits against the Japanese company going on in towns like Pittsburgh, Chicago and Wilmington.